Influence of disorder on the rupture process of fibrous materials

Based on computational modelling the influence of disorder on the rupture process of fibrous materials have been evaluated. This has been done by simulating a bundle of parallel fibers under a constant uniaxial force. The disorder process was introduced by randomly assigning a strength threshold to each fiber of the bundle according to the Weibull distribution. The results indicate that the rupture process is extremely sensitive to the disorder level. In particular, we demonstrated that the load necessary to break a fiber bundle with large disorder is smaller than that necessary to break a fiber bundle with small disorder.